The background: Caveman, who formed a while back, are finally getting the push they deserve, having signed, in the States, to Fat Possum (Smith Westerns, Yuck, Wavves, Band of Horses and lots of other bands we enjoy) and, over here, to Communion (Michael Kiwanuka and lots of other acts we're iffy about). They released an album entitled Coco Beware a couple of years ago and it fit quite nicely in that subsection of alternative US indie that we're going to label Affirmative Americana, a genre that was effectively invented by Mercury Rev on Deserter's Songs and advanced by Flaming Lips on the Soft Bulletin. And yet the music was sufficiently fluid, with its four-part harmonies, keyboard flourishes, guitar digressions and studio diversions, that it earned categorisations as varied as chamber pop, dreampop, folk with synths, ethereal, echo-laden alt country, guitar-heavy psychedelia and soft prog, which is a new one on us.

They've finally got around to releasing a follow-up, and it's self-titled, which tends to confirm the idea that this is a re-start for them. Sketched out in guitarist James Carbonetti's family's place in New Hampshire - where apparently they would sit in a room together, and then each member would go into the bathroom and "record ourselves making the most psycho noises we could think of" - and completed in Brooklyn's Rumpus Room Studios, the sound is grander this time, more lushly ambitious. Well, of course it is: the stripped-down, back to basics album where they recede a little from view and everyone loses interest can only come after the mainstream breakthrough. Is that what happened to Fleet Foxes? We didn't play their second album. See what we mean? Caveman's frontman Iawanusa - a member of the MET opera in his youth - has much of the Robin Pecknold about him, or at least about his voice, which is one of those sad, soaring devices that expresses yearning and sorrow and suggests a human being who is deeply shy and self-effacing while paradoxically dominating every second of each song in a way that is not reticent at all.

You can hear their first album on Spotify and extracts from their new one on iTunes. They're both worth investigating. Hearing them we were moved to add "barbershop west coast harmony pop" to that list of genres. These are white winter hymnals in the middle of summer. Like you'd imagine the Band to sound from their reviews, or what you might expect from the phrase "cosmic American music" once mystifyingly ascribed to Gram Parsons. It's roots rock meets heartbreak pop. CSN&Y with synthesisers, only better than that sounds, with a My Morning Jacket-esque sense of quietly simmering drama. Anticipate heaps of echo/reverb and the sound of drumsticks tapping the metal part of the kit, with apologies for the technical terminology. And as for lyrical leitmotifs, there are none, although at a guess the fragility of existence and the challenges faced during everyday change are being tentatively explored here. Can you be plangent and expansive? Evidently so.